Trivantis takes the fight to Articulate with Snap! Empower

Its going to be an interesting year in the world of e-learning authoring tools. Trivantis has released Snap! Empower for the extremely competitive $99 and is aggressively targeting Articulate users with a very powerful set of features that go well beyond the capabilities offered by Engage at a fraction of the price. What will be more interesting is how this product will compete with the iminent Articulate Storyline which offers similar powerful functionality but seems destined to be offered at a significantly higher price.

One question all these e-learning authoring tools have yet to answer is how to move from flash based publishing to fully featured HTML5 based publishing (as required by iPad and iPhone). Snap! as with other similar tools takes the easy option of publishing to video to provide a limited form of HTML5 compatibility. This simple approach fails to include the rich interactions and opportunities for self exploration and pacing that the flash published versions can embody. We know it is these very aspects of our resources that are most valuable in promoting learning. I wonder how long it will be before we see an e-learning tool which truely tackles this thorny problem… perhaps it will be Storyline and that may just justify its greater cost?

Video for web and iPhone/iPad – lessons learned (the hard way)

As part of a recent project we have been involved in producing a series of short videos for increasing the awareness of doctors of how to use a physiotherapy referal service. A technical am of this project has been to deliver these videos to both PCs and mobile devices, but without using a video delivery service such as YouTube or Vimeo.  So we wanted to encode one version of the video file into a format that would play in a flash video player embedded in a web page and also be playable on the iPhone/iPad which obviously doesn’t currently have a flash player.

To do this we choose to use the JW Player which offers built in HTML 5 support and encoded the video using H.264

The first thing we learnt was that to get the player to substitute the HTML 5 version for the flash version when viewed with an iPhone/iPad, the video player needs to be embedded within the web page using the JW Player’s own JavaScript embedder (jwplayer.js), rather than HTML embed tags or the generic SWFObject javascript embedder.

Unfortunately it then turned out we had another more significant issue to overcome.  Once we had uploaded our video files and began testing them on-line we encountered serious audio synchronisation issues in the videos when viewing on a PC. This problem did not affect viewing on an iPhone and seemed to disappear if the video was paused and restarted. Initially we thought this must be an intermittant file caching issue. However the same problem was reported by various viewers and we slowly realised this was more serious.

A web search eventually found this forum post by Andrew Wallace which appeared to shed light on this problem:

The H.264 is not a completely “contained” compression method — by this I mean that Audio and Video tracks are still treated as separate entities that only QuickTime can recognize integrated timing information to match each track with one another. Flash, however, can not detect this information and so when it sees a gap of no audio, it shifts the remaining audio to fill in the gap, thus causing a sync issue. Why? Not entirely sure — it’s a Flash issue that has never been addressed by Macromedia/Adobe.

The same post suggests a solution to this problem:

Create a white noise track (generated in a sound program like Soundtrack) that is the complete duration of your video tracks and insert it underneath your currently existing audio track. Set the level to around -70dB thus making it inaudible. This track acts as a binding track to keep things in sync. Export as a self-contained file and compress as you normally would. You can still use H.264 as your compression method.

A subsequent post in the same thread suggests that this solution isn’t necessarily always successful…

So what to do… for this particular project we have now chosen to encode into FLV format for PC delivery and offer a separate H.264 version for iPhone/iPad viewers and provide jQuery tabs to allow selection between the video options available. This is not to suggest that a single video format can’t be used, but we have discovered this is not as simple as it appears and so we opted to use a tried and tested approach that we can have confidence in.

Geek Dad – Enough ABC apps already

Geek Dad on Wired asks app developers to move beyond applications to teach basic literacy arguing that these are all very similar, often not well thought through and do not make use of the unique characteristics of the iphone and ipad.

This is indeed a useful and valid point, but it seem to me to miss the fact that there are a huge number of free flash based educational “apps” already available on the web that users of these devices cannot currently access. So app developers have an opportunity here to recreate some of these as apps and make a bit of money in the short term from those users who will pay to access otherwise free resources on their prefered device. Those app developers that really get to grips with the unique educational opportunities offered by these devices will have in my opinion a more valid reason to build a business model around selling educational apps.

Personally I feel like waiting for the non-apple tablets to appear which are likely to run flash before I throw my hat into this particular ring and I would advise any purchaser of mobile devices who has learning and education in mind to do the same.

Flash and mobile phones (the HTC Hero)

I must admit that I haven’t really paid too much attention to mobile phones and consequently mobile learning to date.  That has been largely because the only available flash player on mobiles has been Flash Lite which offers a very limited set of functionality, and because of this it has not looked that likely that flash based applications such as Dragster would be usable on a mobile.

Well it looks like that is going to change and sooner rather than later…

In July 2009 HTC released their touch screen Hero handset which offers a much more capable flash player on the Android operating system. There are numerous reviews of this device out there but the video below (taken from this review by Rob Jackson) demonstrates some of the abilities and limitations of its current flash capabilities.

While its obviously not perfect, this is boding very well for the future, and according to Adobe the flash player is due to be upgraded later this year.

What this appears to be leading to is a future where flash development for the web and mobile devices will become much, much easier and may even get to a point of develop once and deploy onto any device. The project that is making this a reality is the Open Screen project.

This is all very exciting especially in combination with the developments in mobile touch screen interfaces which open up possibilities for more tactile interactions such as drag and drop.

I hope to get my hands on an HTC Hero soon and have a go myself… when I do I’ll post on how I get on.